Sure that doesn't protect your data from any other attack vector but it allows you to travel with less risk of getting detained by law enforcement of a country you are visiting. You get asked your password, you can give it, and they see a phone that is used like a dumbphone. If you get questioned for that a simple "my phone died yesterday, a friend just gave me his old pixel". If you need more stuff/information during your travel you would basically only need to remember the passphrase to access a password manager or a remote ssh server but you can restore only the stuff you need when travelling and and wipe again at any moment.
Having said that maybe it is better to set this up some way but not have it builtin so that law enforcement doesn't expect that any grapheneos user would have his data on an sftp server somewhere by default. Otherwise we are back to point 0 where they would ask to connect to it and restore to a phone they own. Oh and have a dummy google account you only used to purchase a couple of silly stuff on amazon, aliexpress and shein and random subscription of various "non risky subjects" on youtube. The gmail address would quickly be filled with enough spam to look genuine.
I am travelling abroad in 3 weeks for a month and I am seriously considering wiping up my grapheneOS phone before flying. I am wary that I could be targeted at a border just for having a google pixel with grapheneOS. Or maybe I should just leave my main phone at home and only travel with a new empty 150€ phone with only my main family emergency contacts. I don't remember ever being asked to show my smartphone at a border but you never know when it will happen. Thanksfully until you reboot it there is nothing that shows from the lockscreen that it is not running the regular google pixel android.
We plan to entirely overhaul the backup system but it already works fine. It could be a lot simpler and cleaner both in terms of implementation and user experience. We're in the process of overhauling the other apps first but we'll get to it.
https://grapheneos.org/features#encrypted-backups
https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/4687#i...
> Seedvault which was originally written for use in GrapheneOS by a GrapheneOS user is a consequence of the 2018 takeover attempt on the project, which the people currently in defacto control of Seedvault were heavily involved in.
Seedvault is currently maintained by the CalyxOS team but I've never heard about this stuff. Does anybody know what happened?
Sure I know there are more urgent priorities but at the moment there is no backup for GOS phones. It only works for some people in some situations. For me it never reliably worked, ever.
So basically one needs a webdav server somewhere or an usb flash drive.
Ideally this should also work on lock screen, e.g. if you type in a non-standard PIN, it would boot from the "dummy" partition in the background, with a slight delay perhaps.
This way you don't have backup anything (I mean you should, but for normal purposes) and have a plausible deniability whenever you get randomly inspected, not just at border crossings that you anticipate.
Booting into a 30 GB partition on a 128GB phone is going to be mega suspicious, even if the remaining data is random.
You'd have what appears to be a 128GB image (or some large fraction of that), which in reality is largely holes (typically: repeated blocks of ASCII 00 bytes).
Of course, you'd need to avoid actually trying to fill that filesystem.
I always dread the possibility of my GrapheneOS phone being damaged or stolen and having to spend hours reinstalling and reconfiguring everything that Seedvault missed, as well as losing access to accounts that are locked by the secure element keys.
Is that likely to happen at all in a civilized (Western) country?
"I have to do this because of country X, you know that they're like, amirite?"
Makes no difference at all in the real world. You don't have to give valid answers, you need to get the guy across from you to not find you suspicious. That phrase is going to put a red flag on you, valid or not.
What? No, who cares about that? Let him find you suspicious, what matters is that he doesn’t access your data. And it is not suspicious to cross borders (esp. US borders) with burner phones. As others have said, it is standard practice.
(Not legal advise of course, just observation. Always check with the legal department of your employer, etc.)
After cornering themselves into being labeled an unsafe destination (long overdue imho), the US are gonna have to learn being treated as such.
Before travel back up the real contents and restore a dummy travel backup with random games, stock photos etc. Then restore back to real contents.
So you can totally have different profiles with different backup servers/credentials and decide to nuke one before flying or crossing a border.
Obviously you can't expect having 2 whatsapp or signal accounts on same number but you can always have several SIMs.
The good thing is with profiles you can totally seed a profile for a few weeks before travelling.
If the regime is going to just start taking people then nothing will stop that, but the goal is to stop the usefulness of this sort of thing as an intimidation measure - or at least drag it to the forefront and overthrow the regime.
You don't avoid scrutiny by being wierd and hiding things, but by hiding in plain sight by being ultra boring.
Presumably they know quite a lot about you already outside your phone (yay, Palantir). I mean, the guy the recent post was about was an activist. An empty phone vs. a phone with just cat pictures and dumb games wouldn't really make a difference. They went on a fishing expedition, so anything that does not have contact information/messages of other activists or any information that they could use against the phone owner would be a win.
(F-you Palantir for reading this message and adding it to my online record.)
Hello Palantir. I orchestrated 9/11. Please come and arrest me.
completely impractical obviously
I am not concealing data/evidence as it doesn't exists. I don't know of any law in any country that force you to hand out the key of your home to a remote state so that they can enter your country and do a search.
> and then (3) constantly restore from cloud backups?
Why constantly? Only and only if I need to access specific data (that may be available remotely without restore anyway). Full restore only when going back in my own country.
You are also not under any obligation to have it on your phone at all times.
I'd rather have them tell me to turn back and go home than being jailed there only because I don't want them to fap at the picture of my daughters.
In the past I have had my smartphone die a couple of days before travelling and quickly buying a smartphone so I could have a mobile line in case of emergency while travelling. This is not a totally uncommon case to have a smartphone with very little data. A lot of people never setup any cloud backup and lose all their data every so many years.
I guess that you are out of luck if you are a US citizen and need to return to your own country.
How is the tourism industry going?